Falls are one the leading causes of accidental death for all people, but the elderly are at particularly high risk. Falls are severe issue in the care of those elderly people who live alone and have limited access to health aides and skilled nursing care. Conventional vision-based systems for fall detection are prone to failure in conditions with low illumination. Therefore, an automated system that detects falls in low-light conditions has become an urgent need for protecting vulnerable people. This paper proposes a novel vision-based fall detection system that uses object tracking and image enhancement techniques. The proposed approach is divided into two parts. First, the captured frames are optimized using a dual illumination estimation algorithm. Next, a deep-learning-based tracking framework that includes detection by YOLOv7 and tracking by the Deep SORT algorithm is proposed to perform fall detection. On the Le2i fall and UR fall detection (URFD) datasets, we evaluate the proposed method and demonstrate the effectiveness of fall detection in dark night environments with obstacles.

Large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have revolutionized traditional information access, enabling AI agent to search and summarize information on behalf of users during dynamic dialogues. Despite their potential, current AI search engines exhibit considerable room for improvement in several critical areas. These areas include the support for multimodal information, the delivery of personalized responses, the capability to logically answer complex questions, and the facilitation of more flexible interactions. This paper proposes a novel AI Search Engine framework called the Agent Collaboration Network (ACN). The ACN framework consists of multiple specialized agents working collaboratively, each with distinct roles such as Account Manager, Solution Strategist, Information Manager, and Content Creator. This framework integrates mechanisms for picture content understanding, user profile tracking, and online evolution, enhancing the AI search engine's response quality, personalization, and interactivity. A highlight of the ACN is the introduction of a Reflective Forward Optimization method (RFO), which supports the online synergistic adjustment among agents. This feature endows the ACN with online learning capabilities, ensuring that the system has strong interactive flexibility and can promptly adapt to user feedback. This learning method may also serve as an optimization approach for agent-based systems, potentially influencing other domains of agent applications.

Alzheimer’s disease is a chronic neurodegenerative disease that causes brain cells to degenerate, resulting in decreased physical and mental abilities and, in severe cases, permanent memory loss. It is considered as the most common and fatal form of dementia. Although mild cognitive impairment (MCI) precedes Alzheimer’s disease (AD), it does not necessarily show the obvious symptoms of AD. As a result, it becomes challenging to distinguish between mild cognitive impairment and cognitively normal. In this paper, we propose an ensemble of deep learners based on convolutional neural networks for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. The proposed approach utilises simple averaging ensemble and weighted averaging ensemble methods. The ensemble-based transfer learning model demonstrates enhanced generalization and performance for AD diagnosis compared to traditional transfer learning methods. Extensive experiments on the OASIS-3 dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, showcasing its superiority over state-of-the-art transfer learning approaches in terms of accuracy, robustness, and efficiency.

In the realm of structural health monitoring, the automatic detection of cracks on surfaces such as bridges is paramount for ensuring structural integrity. Traditional supervised deep learning models, while capable of predicting the size and location of cracks, are heavily reliant on vast amounts of precisely labeled data, which is not only time-consuming but also impractical in specific scenarios. More critically, these models exhibit limited generalization ability and robustness when confronted with novel or complex datasets. This paper primarily explores the potential of the self-supervised model DinoV2 in crack detection applications, particularly its capability as a powerful visual feature extractor. By leveraging DinoV2 to extract key visual features of crack patterns in images, such as texture, shape and context, we demonstrate how this model can effectively perform crack detection without the support of labeled data. Coupled with a linear classification head, we evaluated the effectiveness of DinoV2 in identifying cracks across a variety of complex backgrounds and compared it with several mainstream supervised learning models. The experimental results indicate that DinoV2 not only enhances the performance of crack detection, especially when dealing with unlabeled images, but also exhibits significant superiority in complex scenarios characterized by high noise and different material textures. This study underscores the application potential of self-supervised models in addressing real-world engineering problems, offering a new perspective for the development of future structural health monitoring technologies.